More than 130 authors have resigned from Grasset, one of France's most historic publishing houses, in an unprecedented collective walkout protesting the growing ideological influence of its right-wing owner, billionaire Vincent Bolloré. The authors — including acclaimed novelist and punk feminist Virginie Despentes, philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Vanessa Springora, whose bestselling memoir Consent about being groomed as a teenager became a major film — published an open letter declaring: "We refuse to be hostages in an ideological war that seeks to impose authoritarianism everywhere in culture and the media. We don't want our ideas, our work, to be his property." The signatories say they will not sign future contracts with Grasset and plan legal action to recover rights to their earlier work.

The immediate trigger was the forced departure of Olivier Nora, who had led Grasset for 26 years and was widely seen as the last internal check on Bolloré's ideological influence. Nora's dismissal is understood to have been linked to a dispute over the manuscript of Boualem Sansal, an Algerian-French novelist who recently moved to Grasset from the rival publisher Gallimard. Sansal, who was imprisoned in Algeria for a year before his release earlier this year, has become a prominent figure on the French far right for his views on what he describes as the Islamisation of France. Nora reportedly refused to rush publication of Sansal's prison memoir and pushed for revisions — a stance that reportedly sealed his fate. He is to be replaced by Jean-Christophe Thiery, a senior executive from Bolloré's Louis Hachette Group.

Grasset, founded in Paris in 1907, has published major figures in French and world literature, including Marcel Proust, François Mauriac, and translations of Stefan Zweig and Gabriel García Márquez. It sits within the Hachette Livre group, which Bolloré's conglomerate Vivendi acquired in 2023 as part of a sweeping expansion into French cultural life. Vivendi now controls CNews, France's most-watched news channel; the Sunday newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche; and scores of publishing imprints worldwide — making it the second-largest publishing group in the UK and third-largest in the United States. Critics argue that the concentration of so much cultural infrastructure in the hands of one ideologically driven owner poses a direct threat to democratic pluralism.

The walkout at Grasset echoes events at another Bolloré-owned publisher, Fayard, where around 40 authors left in 2022 after the dismissal of its editor Sophie de Closets. Fayard has since become known for publishing right-wing and far-right figures including National Rally party leader Jordan Bardella, former president Nicolas Sarkozy, and the anti-immigration businessman Philippe de Villiers. A further 25 academics at Fayard are now also seeking to reclaim their publishing rights.

The protest has crystallised a wider debate in France about media and cultural ownership. Independent booksellers have warned for months about Bolloré's expanding grip on the book industry, and Paris prosecutors recently opened an investigation into racist comments made on CNews against the mayor of Saint-Denis — a claim the channel denies. Bolloré, a Breton industrialist who once described himself as a Christian democrat, told a French Senate hearing in 2022 that his interest in media acquisitions was "purely financial" and that his empire was large enough to contain all points of view. Many in France's literary world are unconvinced. "We can't let all the publishing houses of the Hachette group become far-right," said Colombe Schneck, one of the organisers of the open letter.